Windows CE Programming

Unfortunately, there is no in depth information about the Pocket or Mobile Internet Explorer (PIE) comaptibility. So I can only give some suggestions. But I hope this informations will help you getting started and don’t run into trouble.First, although M$ states, that PIE is compatible to Internet Explorer 4.1, 5.0, 5.5 or 6.0, depending on the OS level you run on a windows ce based device, this is only a general statement:

Pocket Internet Explorer has been updated to support the following:

HTML 4.01
Extensible HTML (XHTML)
Cascading style sheets
Microsoft Jscript® version 5.5
Enhanced scripting and Document Object Model support
Wireless Markup Language (WML) 2.0 (XHTML + WML 1.x)
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in IPv4/IPv6 mixed-mode environments
New extensible imaging library

From TechEd powerpoint

HTML 3.2 Compliant
JavaScript 1.1 compliant
XML Object Model
SSL
Active X support (no download!)
=============================
HTML 3.2-based object model
   Not the IE4 OM
Core script support:
   Scripting against FORM elements
   Scripting against the XML OM<
Not supported:
   Dynamic frameset creation
   Dynamic script generation
   Window.open

If you try some more special functions of the desktop IE versions, you will find the limits very fast. In example, the OnKey() event is not supported in any of the actual CE OS versions (<=6). XML Dataislands support is very limitted.

With AJAX and Windows CE 6, MS will implement more and more feautres needed by the new WEB 2.0 hype sites. So we hope for more and better support of the object model and JScrips in future versions.

Unsorted sources of informations

Some informations I collected:

• Here is an very old doc, describing PIE object model.
• Here is an archived KB article (Q158479) about “HTML Tags, MIME Types, Security Types, and URL Types Supported in Pocket Internet Explorer”
• Here is an old doc about “Pocket Internet Explorer HTML Element Reference”. This is like the help you find if you have installed one of the PocketPC or WM SDKs.
• Here is an old comaprision of the versions.
• WinCE.NET 4.2: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/wcedsn40/html/cgconChoosingInternetBrowser.asp
• WinCE 5.0: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/wceinternet5/html/wce50oriBrowsers.asp
• Here is an overview of Jscript desktop support. And here for Windows CE.
• Here is a doc about “Using XML and XSL in Pocket Internet Explorer”
• Something about CSS support.
• Overview at PocketpcDN.com
• Pocket Internet Explorer Cache Settings
• AllInOne?

Javascript Error Reporting

During your tests, you should always switch javascript error reporting to enabled. For that create/change a registry entry:

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER’Software’Microsoft’Internet Explorer’Main]
"ShowScriptErrors"=dword:00000001

Alternative Browsers

Although there are many special browsers for PocketPC devices, most of them are only programmed on top of the PIE engine and extend the object model more, less or not. If you would like to get a more desktop like browser, from programming point of view, you should try the following ones:

• NetFront (comes with a better documentation about what it supports and what not)
• Minimo (free, opensource mozilla for mobile devices)
• Opera mobile (always a better, more compatible browser?)

Playing wav files

<!-- <bgsound src="file://’windows’asterisk.wav" loop="infinite"> -->
<!-- use refresh to return to page -->
        <object type="audio/x-wav" data="file://’windows’asterisk.wav" width="1" height="1">
        <param name="FileName" value="file://’windows’asterisk.wav">
        <param name="hidden" value="true">
        <param name="loop" value="false">
        <param name="numloop" value="2">
        </object>
<noembed> <p>Could not embed wav file!</p> </noembed>
<embed src="file://’windows’asterisk.wav" width="1" height="1" hidden="true" type="audio/x-wav">
<a href="javascript:document.embeds[0].play()">Starten</a>

Printing with ITC ActiveX control

Source and doc